Violence, Kinship and the Early Chinese State

Violence, Kinship and the Early Chinese State PDF

Author: Roderick Campbell

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-05-03

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 110819558X

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Situated between myth and history, the Shang has been hailed both as China's first historical dynasty and as one of the world's primary civilizations. This book is an up-to-date synthesis of the archaeological, palaeographic and transmitted textual evidence for the Shang polity at Anyang (c.1250–1050 BCE). Roderick Campbell argues that violence was not the antithesis of civilization at Shang Anyang, but rather its foundation in war and sacrifice. He explores the social economy of practices and beliefs that produced the ancestral order of the Shang polity. From the authority of posthumously deified kings, to the animalization of human sacrificial victims, the ancestral ritual complex structured the Shang world through its key institutions of war, sacrifice, and burial. Mediated by hierarchical lineages, participation in these practices was basic to being Shang. This volume, which is based on the most up-to-date evidence, offers comprehensive and cutting-edge insight into the Chinese Bronze Age civilization.

Violence, Kinship and the Early Chinese State

Violence, Kinship and the Early Chinese State PDF

Author: Roderick B. Campbell

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781316647820

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Being, society and world : towards an inter-ontic approach : Shang civilization, historiography and early China -- Cities, states and civilizations -- Central plains civilization from Erlitou to Anyang -- The great settlement Shang and its polity : networks, boundaries and the social economy -- Kinship, place and social order -- Violence and Shang civilization -- Constructing the ancestors : the social economy of burial -- Technologies of pacification and the world of the great settlement Shang

Sanctioned Violence in Early China

Sanctioned Violence in Early China PDF

Author: Mark Edward Lewis

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1990-01-01

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 9780791400760

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This book provides new insight into the creation of the Chinese empire by examining the changing forms of permitted violence--warfare, hunting, sacrifice, punishments, and vengeance. It analyzes the interlinked evolution of these violent practices to reveal changes in the nature of political authority, in the basic units of social organization, and in the fundamental commitments of the ruling elite. The work offers a new interpretation of the changes that underlay the transformation of the Chinese polity from a league of city states dominated by aristocratic lineages to a unified, territorial state controlled by a supreme autocrat and his agents. In addition, it shows how a new pattern of violence was rationalized and how the Chinese of the period incorporated their ideas about violence into the myths and proto-scientific theories that provided historical and natural prototypes for the imperial state.

The King's Harvest

The King's Harvest PDF

Author: Brian Lander

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2021-11-30

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 0300262728

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A multidisciplinary environmental history of early China’s political systems, featuring newly available Chinese archaeological data This book is a multidisciplinary study of the ecology of China’s early political systems up to the fall of the first empire in 207 BCE. Brian Lander traces the formation of lowland North China’s agricultural systems and the transformation of its plains from diverse forestland and steppes to farmland. He argues that the growth of states in ancient China, and elsewhere, was based on their ability to exploit the labor and resources of those who harnessed photosynthetic energy from domesticated plants and animals. Focusing on the state of Qin, Lander amalgamates abundant new scientific, archaeological, and excavated documentary sources to argue that the human domination of the central Yellow River region, and the rest of the planet, was made possible by the development of complex political structures that managed and expanded agroecosystems.

Violence and the Rise of Centralized States in East Asia

Violence and the Rise of Centralized States in East Asia PDF

Author: Mark Edward Lewis

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-03-31

Total Pages: 116

ISBN-13: 1108982980

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Violence, both physical and nonphysical, is central to any society, but it is a version of the problem that it claims to solve. This Element examines how states in ancient East Asia, from the late Shang through the end of the Han dynasty, wielded violence to create and display authority, and also how their licit violence was entangled in the 'savage' or 'criminal' violence whose suppression justified their power. The East Asian cases are supplemented through citing comparable Western ones. The themes examined include the emergence of the warrior as a human type, the overlap of hunts and combat (and the overlap between treatments of alien species and alien peoples), sacrifice of both alien captives and 'death attendants' from one's own groups, the impact of military specialization and the increased scale of armies, the emergent ideal of self-sacrifice, and the diverse aspects of violence in the regime of law.

Designing Boundaries in Early China

Designing Boundaries in Early China PDF

Author: Garret Pagenstecher Olberding

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-11-18

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1009084062

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Ancient Chinese walls, such as the Great Wall of China, were not sovereign border lines. Instead, sovereign space was zonally exerted with monarchical powers expressed gradually over an area, based on possibilities for administrative action. The dynamically shifting, ritualized articulation of early Chinese sovereignty affects the interpretation of the spatial application of state force, including its cartographic representations. In Designing Boundaries in Early China, Garret Pagenstecher Olberding draws on a wide array of source materials concerning the territorialization of space to make a compelling case for how sovereign spaces were defined and regulated in this part of the ancient world. By considering the ways sovereignty extended itself across vast expanses in early China, Olberding informs our understanding of the ancient world and the nature of modern nation-states.

Metamorphic Imagery in Ancient Chinese Art and Religion

Metamorphic Imagery in Ancient Chinese Art and Religion PDF

Author: Elizabeth Childs-Johnson

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-05-30

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1000873129

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Metamorphic Imagery in Ancient Chinese Art and Religion demonstrates that the concept of metamorphism was central to ancient Chinese religious belief and practices from at least the late Neolithic period through the Warring States Period of the Zhou dynasty. Central to the authors' argument is the ubiquitous motif in early Chinese figurative art, the metamorphic power mask. While the motif underwent stylistic variation over time, its formal properties remained stable, underscoring the image’s ongoing religious centrality. It symbolized the metamorphosis, through the phenomenon of death, of royal personages from living humans to deceased ancestors who required worship and sacrificial offerings. Treated with deference and respect, the royal ancestors lent support to their living descendants, ratifying and upholding their rule; neglected, they became dangerous, even malevolent. Employing a multidisciplinary approach that integrates archaeologically recovered objects with literary evidence from oracle bone and bronze inscriptions to canonical texts, all situated in the appropriate historical context, the study presents detailed analyses of form and style, and of change over time, observing the importance of relationality and the dynamic between imagery, materials, and affects. This book is a significant publication in the field of early China studies, presenting an integrated conception of ancient art and religion that surpasses any other work now available.

State and Family in China

State and Family in China PDF

Author: Yue Du

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-11-11

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1108838359

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Examines the intersection of politics and intergenerational family relations in China from the Qing period to 1949.

The order of the world in house and state

The order of the world in house and state PDF

Author: Wolf Rainer Wendt

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-09-28

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 3658384603

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In the world, the home and the state prove themselves and change as basic institutions of human coexistence. They are the subject of a comparative study on an ecotheoretical basis. In the global context, the modes of social control have developed differently in the home and the state. In and with them, order is created in the world and for the individual and collective conduct of life. The institutional frameworks of house and state in the world are ways of shaping existence that are juxtaposed in their European-Occidental and East Asian forms: Their discussion takes place along the ancient Greek basic concepts and forms of thought of the oikos, the polis and the cosmos on the one hand and the ancient Chinese categories jia, guo and tianxia on the other. They are discussed with their ethical, political and economic references in their traditional and contemporary meaning and with regard to their ecological sustainability. The interest in a discursive understanding of sustainable, life-serving orders in the face of global challenges is the guiding principle

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